TI to put floating point in every DSP core

Base station market

So, what’s the landscape for the base station market today?

TI continues as number one, followed by Freescale and LSI Corp., according to Forward Concepts’ Strauss. Earlier this year, Strauss observed TI garnering a 61 percent of the wireless infrastructure DSP market, followed by Freescale at 16%, LSI at 9% and Others (including Fujitsu, NEC, etc.) at 14%.  

Many analysts note that Freescale has become a formidable competitor to TI. Joseph Byrne, senior analyst at the Linley Group, said, “Freescale has done well recently on the strength of its products.” Freescale was early with a 45nm DSP and used this process-technology advantage to integrate on a single chip more DSP cores than TI, and ‘MAPLE-B’ coprocessor that offloads certain functions related to baseband processing, he added.

Indeed, “while many thought TI had locked up the base station market at one point, Freescale made a successful bid to it – in the LTE/4G market – over the last two years,” said BDTI’s Bier. Freescale’s success inspired others like “Mindspeed Technologies and LSI Logic to take some pieces of the action,” Bier added.

While nothing is announced, Intel, too, has made clear overtures toward the base station market, according to Bier. Intel, at the SDR conference a year ago, unveiled its SDR implementation in wireless base stations, using Intel’s PC processors.

Strauss also noted that FPGAs continue to have “a significant role in the base station market.” Even though TI swears that their newest chip ‘doesn't require FPGAs, Strauss said, “Every time I peek into the base station, there are a number of FPGAs...sometimes employed as RF down converters, which is still a necessary DSP function, but not as part of the baseband.”

As competition intensifies, each player needs to get even more creative in new product offerings. The issue is how future base-station SoCs handle not just the physical (Layer 1) and data link layers (Layer 2) but the network layer (Layer 3) and above in the OSI model.

In TI’s new base station SoC, TI’s engineering team integrated an autonomous packet processing engine and programmable DSPs enabling full multicore entitlement, in addition to the filed proven PHY technology where TI’s legacy strength lies.  

Freescale, meanwhile, has a distinct edge in its network processors, which have remained separate products thus far. Industry analysts like Bier are closely watching when and how Freescale may integrate such network processing functions into base station products.